PAPER TIGERS..BAH HUMBUG..

 

PAPER TIGERS…BAH HUMBUG…

In my 84 years on earth, I have had 3 separate government contracts. One with a city, one with a state and one with the federal government. They were not easy to obtain and required a lot of time and energy to maintain. All of them required performance.

In all of these I had numerous inspectors and overseers from the agency we were contracted to do the work for. Were these inspectors always fair about their assignments and inspections? Did they seem silly about some of their rules and requirements? Yes in some cases they did.  But they were through, I’ll give them that.

 You don’t have enough time to listen to my stories about this. One example…I was written up and cited by the Department of Defense because we had punched a hole in the approval certificate for one of our employees holding a secret clearance for a government contract. It made no sense, but we still had to rectify the situation.

They inspected us from one end to the other to see if we were billing correctly, operating as was called for according to the contract and were we as a company fulfilling the terms and objectives of the contract. These inspections came regularly throughout the contact periods.

Today, we are besieged with daily doses of fraud and abuse in every state and in every agency. Voter fraud, dead social security recipients, charities without any offices or benefit to anyone other than its owner. And the list goes on day after day.

I’m tired of it, aren’t you?

A 24-year-old young man named Nick Shirley has started exposing massive amounts of fraud costing the US taxpayers billions of dollars. His life has been threatened, and he has been harassed in many places throughout the country. California has passed a law making it illegal to expose fraud and corruption in certain cases. Total insanity if you ask me. This kid should receive a medal, not fear for his life over exposing massive amounts of corruption in our system.

My question is simple, where were the auditors and agency supervisors who should have been monitoring these contracts and why did it only get exposed by Mr. Shirley? How do they get renewed year after year without producing any verifiable results?

In one case, a hospice provider billed over 57 million dollars before it came out that none of the people enrolled had died. Isn’t that the purpose of a hospice to care for the dying? Was this company some type of miracle worker group who managed to heal all of their patients. I think not. Hospices should not have folks getting healed and walking out, these are facilities where terminally ill patients go to spend their last days. They are not recreation centers.

In another situation, he found a charity that had received 87.9 million tax dollars and was on record as having 7900 members receiving services. His visit to the facility proved otherwise in a short period of time. Even the employees said the number was incorrect, but they were still billing $1600 for each member each year.   

Obviously both children’s and adult day care facilities should have a physical presence other than a restaurant or a bakery address. It also should have children or older adults with supervisors. It should not be closed to anyone asking for information on how to enroll their child or elderly adult. Enrollment applications should be readily available if asked for. The person asking for this information should not be treated in a hostile manner or asked to leave. Nor should they be threatened by police action or bodily injury if they don’t leave the building.

Where are the contract auditors for these billions of tax dollars. Why did it take a civilian young man to bring this to our attention? Where is the Dept. of Justice or regulatory agency? Once these contracts get approved and started, who does the follow-up to determine if they are effective and operating in accordance with the terms spelled out in the contracts?

All of us can tune into the congressional hearing of the day for which we can watch a total clown show in which nothing gets accomplished except camera time for the participants. Any congressperson asking a question is often answered with a vague response or the famous line.... ‘I’ll have to get that information and get back to you on that.’ Which of course never happens. Some of these participants cannot recall their annual salary or any statistic relating to their operational responsibility. Most of the information is readily available on the internet if it is needed for review. None of these people are minimum wage employees, although they should be, in my opinion. If you don’t know the basics about your agency or your department, perhaps the Golden Arches could take you on as a fry cook.

I have written and asked these questions of our members of congress, both in the senate and the house without any explanation. The same as any inquiry to the FBI.

Oh, you get a nice letter back with glowing praises for having contacted their office and how much they appreciate taking the time to write, but these letters are generic in nature and can cover any topic being questioned. Most likely produced by some low-ranking employee or intern. They never answer any direct questions,

and you get sugar coated responses such as these:

“We are looking into those kinds of problems”.

“It was so good of you to bring this to my attention.”

“We are making progress in these issues”.

“If I need more information, I will call on you to help”.

Blab…Blab…Blab

As you might expect nothing gets done and the fraud and abuse marches onward.

Elected politicians should be put on notice that we are tired of this and want to see results, not words from paper tigers.

Show us some backbone and do something to instill confidence in our government.

We are losing our patience with you.

 

See you next week….Peary Perry